A lot of changes have happened to bittyblog over the past couple months. It has finally got to a place that I'm happy with so there probably won't be any more updates for a while.

So what has changed? Here's a quick list:

• Tags: both posts and pages can have tags associated with them. Adding tags to pages will have that page show all posts containing that tag. A pretty handy feature for creating subpages on a blog for specific topics.
• fastCGI: everything supports fastCGI now for faster response times.
• RSS: adding 'rss' to the query string will return the page results in RSS instead of HTML. RSS isn't something that I really use but I think it's still pretty popular so it's a good feature to have on blogs.
• Caching: bittyblog now has a built-in cache that can be activated for extra fast response times. I got about a 5-fold increase in the number of processed requests when testing on my desktop.
• Misc: lots of other miscellaneous changes and refactors to improve the code and speed.

So with bittyblog in a good spot I've finally launched my new site: LinuxGameNetwork (logo at the top of this post). A blog focusing on all topics related to Linux, gaming, and Linux gaming. My plan is to keep up frequent updates for 6 months and see what how the readership changes; after then I will probably re-evaluate what my goals for the site should be.

In the meantime please check it out if you are interested in Linux gaming and subscribe to the RSS feed if you're into that.

Lately I've had a lot of motivation to upgrade bittyblog. It started as a simple CGI app to host my personal weblog, however, I have a larger blogging project in mind that I would also like to use bittyblog for. So to get it ready, I've made several nice improvements.

Template Support

Previously, all the HTML had been hard-coded into the bittyblog's C source files. I tried to abstract this away as much as possible but it just became too much. There is a very nice mustache implementation that somebody wrote in C and that I was able to import into my project. Now I can manage HTML completely separate from the C code which greatly speeds up development and layout changes since a recompile is no longer necessary for HTML changes.

Primitive CMS

Old bittyblog had no way to manage posts or images from the browser. Everything was done by manually uploading pictures and editing the database over ssh which was very time consuming and clunky. Now I can add new posts and images easily from the new bbadmin.cgi page.

Setup Script

For a project that aims for simplicity, setting up bittyblog was actually quite a hassle. In an effort to help this I made a small install script that sets up the database and fills in global variables automatically. This has been really useful when setting up bittyblog on different machines. I got used to having a bunch of hard-coded variables that I never had to touch when developing but were nightmare when redeploying.

Of course, I have to eat what I grow, so my personal blog is now running the new version of bittyblog. Even though it looks the same to you in the browser, behind the scenes there have been a lot of nice improvements that will feed nicely into my other blogging project. Next on the list is a round of code cleanup and then improving the CMS system to make it easy working with a large number of posts and media.

Check out the new updates on github.

There's one guaranteed way to a good start to the new year: new computer hardware! Previously I had been hosting this site on an aging Raspberry Pi 2 and it was due time for an upgrade.

As much as I wanted to stay in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem and move to a Pi 3, Asus' Tinker Board sounded too good to pass up. Its biggest advantage over the Pi is a dedicated Gigabit ethernet adapter, perfect for a webserver. The Raspberry Pi shares its ethernet with the USB circuitry which means slow Megabit speeds. It can also quickly become saturated when reading data from an external USB drive and using the network at the same time.

Moving to new hardware also surfaced some bugs in minihttp so it was nice to further improve the server code as well. So far everything has been running great and I'm really pleased with the speed.

And of course, it's fitted with a new LCD display and a speaker. Similarly to the old server, the LCD cycles between temperature, CPU usage, and website hits. The speaker is set to play a chime whenever somebody uploads an image to our family picture frame.

The more I play around with Julia the better things seem to get. With web-stuff on my mind lately from working on MiniHTTP I thought it would be cool to create a simple web API for adding charts to any webpage. Thanks to a couple packages (HttpServer.jl and Plots.jl) this was dead easy in Julia.

The basis for handling requests for charts is by creating a simple HTTP Handler. This checks the URL that was supplied and, if it matches, dispatches the correct chart.

http = HttpHandler() do req::Request, res::Response
  if ismatch(r"^/randomchart",req.resource)
    Response(random_chart(), headers("image/png"))
  elseif ismatch(r"^/linechart",req.resource)
    Response(line_chart(req.resource), headers("image/png"))
  else
    Response(400)
  end
end

Above there are two endpoints that we can match. The first one is if the URL starts with ‘/randomchart’, in this case the function ‘random_chart()’ is called which generates some random numbers and plots them to a chart. The chart at the top of this post in made this way and, since it is random, every time this page is refreshed the chart will be slightly different.

The second endpoint is for generating a custom line chart. If the URL starts with ‘/linechart’ then the function ‘line_chart(::AbstractString)’ is called. This function expects that a query string is attached to the end of the supplied URL that contains a list of x and y coordinates to plot on a line graph. For instance, the URL ‘/linechart?x=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10&y=1,2,2.5,2,3,1,1.5,3,0.5,2’ was used to generate the plot below.

And that’s really all there is to it. The full code (which is less than 50 lines!) has been uploaded to my Github if you would like to take a further look. With a little extra work, this could be fleshed out to a very nice and easy-to-use web graphing API for people who just want to be able to quickly add some charts to a website.

Update(20-02-2017): I've shut down one of my Amazon EC2 instances so the charts shown above are now static images instead of dynamically generated from Julia.